The Seductive Lie of Eating ‘Well’
“The best part of it is,” my friend was raving to me about the low-calorie ice cream Halo Top, “that you get to eat the whole thing, and not feel bad about it.” The basis of any indulgence is the full-bodied desire it imparts on you to wholly consume the thing, even with – or perhaps on the promise of – the pleasurable twinge of guilt that accompanies the warmth of satisfaction spreading through you. Brands like Halo Top and Skinny Pop, masquerading as ‘healthier’ versions of the real deal (often in offering less calories, fat, or more protein), present an enticing antidote to this conundrum, a loophole around the long-denounced sins of consuming fat and sugar, one that grants us permission to not just have our cake, but to eat the whole thing too.
How our guilty-pleasure foods have come to be marketed this way reveals something fraught about the nature of our relationship to food. Selling a product on the basis of key words meant to signal ‘healthiness’, like being no-fat or sugar-free, overlays our choice and consumption of certain foods with language that confers, in addition to its supposed nutritional value, a moral and social significance. This sort of mindset echoes the tenets of the ‘clean eating’ trend, whose popularity has tapered off in recent years, in which certain ‘clean’ foods – often meaning fresh and unprocessed – are seen as healthier and more natural to put into your body over ‘dirty’ foods – processed, packaged, artificial – despite the definition of ‘clean’ and ‘natural’ foods being wishy-washy at best and having no scientific basis.
My local ice cream shop has a popular, jet-black ice cream made with activated charcoal, an ingredient touted in wellness circles for its supposed (and misleading) detoxifying benefits. In addition to making my scoops of salted caramel extremely photogenic, it also makes me feel like I’m cheating at eating ‘real’ ice cream, just a bit – the presence of an added health benefit sloughs away some of the guilt of having something otherwise laden with those dreaded adjectives. What activated charcoal has in common with other health trends, like raw diet detoxes or juice cleanses, is in how all of these implicitly effuse the benefits of expunging bad things like toxins and ‘unnatural’ chemicals from our bodies, in favor of sticking to all-natural foods and ingredients (even though the way activated charcoal is manufactured is not all that natural).
“Natural” connotes an authenticity and purity inherent within these foods that would be removed by human processing; the concept that consuming fresh, natural, and organic food is better for our bodies imparts a virtuous light onto my choice of grain bowl or celery kale smoothie for lunch that is simultaneously appealing and performative. What each iteration of dieting and restrictive eating lifestyles like clean eating communicate is less about the desire to supply our bodies with the nutrients to function healthily – in which case the same nutritional value received from foods bought fresh at an organic grocery can be acquired from their canned or frozen, and often cheaper, supermarket counterparts – and is more about the social capital gained through inadvertently reinforcing the ways healthiness is often conflated with ideas of restrictive eating and thinness as a fitness ideal.
Though the language of dieting has since been paved over with larger and more holistic ideas of wellness, with taglines like ‘healthy is the new skinny’ that also now preach emotional and spiritual well-being, its replacement suggests perhaps something more subtly insidious than a simple re-branding of Weight Watchers into a wellness-focused company – rather than reflecting shifting cultural values, health-conscious acts of ‘wellness’, whether in the rise of adding chlorophyll supplements or plant-based superfood powders to your self-care rituals, seem more like the fundamental aspects of diet culture covertly repackaged into select ideas of holistic health in an aesthetically pleasing, social media-friendly manner.
The path to good health is not singularly defined by what we put in our stomachs nor correlative with the shape of our bodies; our environment, socioeconomic levels, work and life stress, social and emotional well-being, all play fundamental roles in constituting our health, and putting too much emphasis on a diet that excludes – or relies only on – a rubric of particular nutrients under the guise of ‘healthiness’ ignores these fundamental aspects of a life. Avoiding all carbs or sugars in pursuit of a body or lifestyle that society rewards not only abolishes one of life’s cardinal pleasures, but also lands us on a treadmill that handily places the burden and responsibility of our health and bodies solely on our shoulders.
I can understand the appeal of this – adherence to these health regiments and structured lifestyles offers an attractive solution and set of steps to guide us through our shared anxieties in pursuing good health and living, of which there are no clearly defined goalposts. Many rituals of healthy eating requires us to impose ascetic, almost puritanical self-discipline on our bodies, to consciously regulate what we consume and how we exercise, consequently enforcing the internalized pressure we feel to “earn” eating certain foods and atone for indulgences.
Knowing this won’t make me stop enjoying foods like Halo Top – it’s a low-calorie ice cream that actually tastes good – but it does hone in for me on how the language of the wellness industry perpetuates the existing ideas of social class and personal values we attach to health, and the deeply, morally ingrained ways we’ve been primed to talk about our bodies and consumption of food in pursuit of it.